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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 

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A GLANCE AT 
GOVERNMENT 

SHORT ESSAYS ON 

THE RISE AND BASIS OF GOVERNMENT, 

THE STUDT OF POLITICS, THE UNITY 

OF SOVEREIGNTY, AND THE 

SAVING PRINCIPLE 



BY 

CICERO W. HARRIS 

AUTHOR OF " A (FORTHCOMING) HISTORY OF THE 
SECTIONAL STRUGGLE" 



TC 



LADELPHIA^;,^^ 



PHILADELPHIA 

PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 

1896 



h 



13 



Copyright, 1896, 

BY 

Cicero W. Harris. 



THIS LITTLE BOOK IS DEDICATED, WITH THE 

PROFOUND RESPECT OF THE AUTHOR, 

TO HIS FRIEND 

B. J. SAGE, Esq., 

AUTHOR OF " THE REPUBLIC OF REPUBLICS," 
SINCEREST OF AMERICAN POLITICAL THINKERS. 



PREFACE. 



The first two divisions of this " Fragment 

of Government"' * treat of government in 

general ; the last three, of government in 

the United States. The whole is simply 

what its title imports, — " A Glance at 

Government." 

Cicero W. Harris. 

Washington, February, 1896. 
* Bentham. 



I* 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

The Rise of Government 9 

The Basis of Government 26 

The Study of Politics 32 

The Unity of Sovereignty 38 

The Saving Principle 45 



THE 

RISE OF GOVERNMENT. 



No statement of the origin of civilization 
and government is reasonable which does 
not take into consideration the condition 
of the world as it is revealed by research 
into prehistoric manners and customs. In 
other words, the world of to-day is not the 
world of yesterday in important particulars. 
Sir John Lubbock, with the instinct of the 
naturalist, seeks in the present life and 
usages among savages the key to the mys- 
teries of the archaic past. He thinks he 
finds in the endogamy and exogamy of the 
Polynesians and Southern Africans, in the 
brute-like solitude of the Dyaks of Borneo, 
and in various other traits of barbarous 
peoples in the existing world a sufficient 
explanation of what lay beyond the ken 
of the oldest students in the early ages of 

9 



IO A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Etruria, and 
" almighty Rome." On the other hand, 
such historical investigators into law and 
government as Sir Henry Maine, men of 
supreme fidelity to the critical method and 
of comprehensive and luminous intellects, 
have not availed themselves of all the 
knowledge within their reach, — knowledge 
which would have modified their views on 
some topics and extended their outlook in 
all directions. Perhaps, after all, the truest 
view of the origin of civilization has been 
taken by those French and German sci- 
entists who are free from scepticism, on 
the one hand, and from the transcendental 
notions of modern philosophy on the 
other. The critical method has ascertained 
during this century at least these cardinal 
points bearing on our subject : The true 
philology, without which any study of 
early institutions would be impossible ; 
through that the foundation of Aryan civ- 
ilization in the wonderful Sanscrit texts ; 
the knowledge of early Roman law in the 
discovery by Niebuhr at Rome of the 
treatise by the great jurisconsult, Gaius ; 



THE RISE OF GOVERNMENT. II 

the " finds" in Behistun, Nineveh, Rosetta, 
and on the upper Nile, the revelations 
(vague as they are) of the Moabitish 
mountain cities, the very latest unearthings 
of Troy, Tiryns, and Mykaenae by Schlie- 
mann. The age has been prolific of the 
most brilliant and the most profound 
scholarship. To mention the mere names 
of the investigators would take the space 
of an article of more than average length, 
and then — such is human infirmity — some 
of the very greatest would inevitably be 
omitted. 

Early man, — what was he, absolutely 
and relatively ? Far down in the bowels 
of Southwestern France, in ancient Ger- 
many, in the kitchen-middens of Denmark, 
in the mounds of North America, remains 
of an extinct civilization have recently 
been exhumed. With the buried races 
of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, at least, 
savans have remarked the presence of the 
implements of civilization far different from 
any known to exist among the races of 
man which have flourished in the geolog- 
ical period in which we live. Crude but 



12 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

distinct drawings on bone far in advance 
of the execution of the lowest savages of 
our age have been recovered. It has been 
seen that the polar bear, the mammoth, 
the reindeer of a huge now non-existent 
species, stalked the plains and primeval 
forests of Gaul and the Netherlands. 
Trees that no longer live in such latitudes 
have been found in the peat bogs of Scan- 
dinavia. Philology has come to the aid 
of palaeontology and archaeology, and 
words have been unravelled and roots have 
been traced through a dozen languages up 
to their primitive source or sources. In- 
stead of the verbal culture which simplified 
the speech of early man, as heretofore 
imagined, we see that he spoke in poly- 
syllables words of learned length and 
thundering sound. Indeed, all of our 
forefathers' ideas with respect to primitive 
culture have been revolutionized. Science 
has blown its breath on them, and they 
have perished. 

The first man was timorous. He trem- 
bled, as Montesquieu says, at the fall of 
a leaf. But when other men came, and 



THE RISE OF GOVERNMENT. 1 3 

association was formed, we had the first 
society. It came about in mutual need 
and knowledge. Men, like some animals, 
must have company. The first movement 
was probably friendly, the second hostile ; 
some men, not satisfied with what they had 
by occupation or combination, made war 
for conquest or imagined self-protection on 
others. Hence associations for govern- 
ment and wars of conquest and aggran- 
dizement. 

Before diversity of race arose there was 
civilization and government. Before na- 
tions there were tribes. Before tribes 
there were communities. Before com- 
munities there were families. The first 
governor of men was the patriarch, the 
first rule that of patria potcstas, as the 
civil lawyers phrase it. Out of the need 
of society sprang the rule of the one. 
But it was not perhaps in the beginning a 
despotic rule, as of an absolute master 
over life and property, but representative, 
the father first, then the father's direct de- 
scendants, then his fictitious representa- 
tives, and last of all a collateral descend- 



14 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

ant. The patriarch among Chaldeans, 
Hebrews, and Hindoos was head of the 
family in religious usage as well as 
material concerns. He offered the earliest 
sacrifices as pontifex maximus by right of 
his position. The very earliest worship 
was that of a Supreme Being — it may 
have been anthropomorphic or otherwise. 
The Hebrew and Semitic God was a per- 
sonal deity. But the Aryan Dyaus-pitar 
(Heaven-father) seems to have been a 
Divine Reason embodied, if embodied, in 
the grand element that was imminent in 
thought and potency at the moment. If 
lightning, it was Indra ; if earthly creature, 
Agni ; and so forth. The earliest religious 
culture was simple but very pure. Error 
crept in apace as wealth was acquired and 
the conquering arms brought under newer 
and lower races. It is not necessary to 
accept all the philosophers say as to the 
origin of religion. Suffice it to claim as 
probably true that all races, all nations 
that have appeared on the earth, have 
been worshippers in some guise of super- 
natural power. Among most of the an- 



THE RISE OF GOVERNMENT. 1 5 

cients this power or these powers were a 
part of the visible world or universe. The 
modern notion of abstraction of deity 
seems to have been but dimly grasped by 
a few of the more elevated minds among 
the ancients. In India, religion continued 
to be the basis of society and government. 
The Brahmans superseded the Vedic hym- 
nologists, and laid heavy burdens on the 
conscience. At first there was no caste. 
Then the Brahman claimed an intellectual 
and spiritual primacy. He did not arro- 
gate material pomp and dignity, but left, 
as a general thing, the administration of 
the regal government to the two other 
high-caste elements, the Kshatriya and 
Vaisyha. But he was priest, lawyer, and 
teacher. Failing other heirs, and some- 
times even if there were other heirs, he 
succeeded to his pupils' estate. 

The world w T as probably peopled from 
Armenia or the table-lands of Pamir, in 
the northwest of India and northeast of 
Afghanistan, south of Central Asia.* But 

* Latham gives Germany as the birthplace of the 
Aryan nations. 



1 6 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

there is respectable authority among phil- 
ologists and ethnologists for the statement 
that the original home of the Aryan or 
Indo-European family of nations was in 
Germany. Geiger quotes on this head 
the Englishman Latham with entire ap- 
probation, but without any convincing 
argument. It is certain that only a small 
part of the great human species belongs 
to this progressive race. The larger por- 
tion springs from other sources, and has 
remained, if not stationary, at least at a 
comparatively low state of development 
within the knowledge of civilized peoples. 
But it is a mistake to rate such races as 
the Finns, the Arabs, the Chinese, as un- 
deserving of the notice of historians and 
anthropologists. Possibly the theory of 
the Frenchman Quatrefages, a very con- 
servative investigator, is the correct one : 
they arrived at a period of development 
commensurate with their physical and 
mental powers, and while their skulls in- 
dicate the ability to make enlargement of 
faculties, the disposition has been wanting, 
due probably, as another authority states, 



THE RISE OF GOVERNMENT. \*J 

to the morbid character of their ancestor 
worship. However that may be, and we 
know that religion is one of the most im- 
portant bases of national character, — how- 
ever, we say, that may be, the master race 
of history has been the Aryan, taking any 
considerable stretch of time in which to 
judge. But, as might easily be shown, it 
is not the great Aryan race which first 
built cities and established empires, which 
founded the science of astronomy, which 
invented letters ; but that people of lingual 
affinity with the Turks and Finns, the 
Accadians, or ancient Chaldeans.* Both 
Assyria and Egypt were probably in ex- 
istence before the earliest invasion of what 
is now known as Hindostan. The Aryans 
were first a hunting then a pastoral race, 
long before they knew what commerce 
was or had a name for ship or ocean. 

We have not discussed the unity or 
variety of mankind, but have rather as- 



* The very latest investigators seem to throw some 
doubt on this, but I have kept the text unaltered as in- 
dicating the probable view. 
2* 



1 8 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

sumed the former. It is a demonstrable 
theory, aside from Scriptural revelation. 
But space is wanting for proofs. Some of 
the more recent scientists have shown that 
both Darwin and Agassiz were mistaken 
in the assumption of various origins of 
the human species. 

In this essay the physical method has 
been relied upon in part and the lingual in 
part ; for science is one, and the basis of 
civilization is neither exclusively mental 
nor entirely moral, however much the 
ethical and philosophical elements may 
enter into the statement. 

Before defining what we mean by gov- 
ernment and liberty, let us sum up the 
particulars of elementary man. I. We 
have a creature at the head of creation, 
endowed with reason and free agency. 2. 
His relations are with, first, a supreme 
Creator and Governor ; second, his fellow- 
men ; third, his own future. These rela- 
tions determine his whole status and fix 
him in the scale of being. They are 
necessary to his continued rational exist- 
ence. Without the idea of God he is 



THE RISE OF GOVERNMENT. 1 9 

spiritually hopeless. Without civil rela- 
tions he is a cave-dweller, adrift on the 
wilderness, at the mercy of the strongest 
and fiercest, having no comfort, no real 
pleasures, no mental exhilaration, no def- 
inite aims of existence, no care for any- 
thing higher or better than simple food, 
scant raiment, crude lodging, and content 
with these and physical safety from the 
storm and ravening beast or insidious rep- 
tile. Whatever man may have been in the 
beginning, he had desires above these, we 
believe on evidence : he was endowed with 
at least gesture if not simple speech, and he 
looked beyond the present life, it may have 
been faintly, gropingly, imagining death an 
extended sleep with dreams of things he 
knew in the life of the present. We con- 
ceive of primitive man as a rational creat- 
ure, and as such possessed of faculties 
above those of mere imitation and brute 
necessity. We conceive of him as a moral 
creature, recognizing God through that 
spark from the Divine Spirit, his immortal 
soul. We conceive of him, last of all, as 
a social being compelled by the instincts 



20 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

and aspirations of his order to make society 
and established government for his own 
welfare and pleasure. 

The first government was patriarchal. 
As the wants of men and the number of 
men increased families became village 
communities or septs, and these in turn 
formed by association, clans, tribes, and 
nations. At first, all of the members of 
the little state were bound by close con- 
sanguineous ties. Then, as the common- 
wealth grew, the family (this was in India, 
but something like it was seen in other 
early nations) became a sort of fiction and 
was incorporated by the name of Joint 
Undivided Family. The patria potestas 
was extended to the nearest of kin in the 
direct line, presently to be supplied in de- 
fault of heirs by various substitutes and 
the collateral kindred. The principle of 
representation is not once lost, but is kept 
alive even after the joint family has passed 
(not by absorption, however) into the tribe 
and the father or father's representative 
has become the chieftain. In this primi- 
tive state, some of the philosophers and 



THE RISE OF GOVERNMENT. 21 

savans represent, the wives as well as the 
lands and flocks were communal. Religion 
in the far East, at least, degenerated into 
ancestor worship or the cult of the pitris. 
The more Eastern nations reached early 
a stage of considerable cultivation and 
stopped developing, perhaps not suddenly, 
perhaps not altogether at all, but only by 
comparison with the Western robust 
nations of modern times. The highest 
culture ever obtained was that of Athens, 
the highest jurisprudence that of Rome. 
There is nothing in the art and law of India 
and China comparable with the ideas of the 
Periclean, Augustan, and Justinian ages. 

This essay is too short for a review of 
the influence of religion and culture upon 
law and government. We know that some 
nations who achieved a noble development 
in art and literature had low ideals in re- 
ligion and defective principles of govern- 
ment. But it is probably safe to say that 
no permanent and high civilization in the 
completest sense is possible where there is 
no just conception of the relation between 
these branches of civilization. Certainly 



22 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

the remark is true of some ancient nations 
whose civilization is buried and lost. Egyp- 
tian beast and river worship, the external 
form of an internal religion,— that of the 
priests, — may not at first glance consort 
with the grand, massive art of Luxor and 
the splendors of Memphis. But the ser- 
vile people, who obeyed their own natures 
in bowing down to the crocodile and the 
will of a tyrant in placing great stones one 
upon the other, through centuries, fell at 
last into such degradation as has over- 
taken only those nations who have imitated 
their example or, without having it before 
their eyes, have adopted its spirit. The 
high Aryan conqueror, springing from the 
cradle of nations and waving his scimitar 
as his warrant of authority, may not in 
the earlier days of his power have had 
"the wisdom of the Egyptians," but he 
had what was far better, a clearer idea of 
his place among men and his responsi- 
bility to the Supernal Power. 

Man is great by inheritance and effort. 
The German, Celtic, and Slavonian races 
are the foremost because they have not 



THE RISE OF GOVERNMENT. 23 

sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. 
Not the first to leave their ancestral seats 
among the high table-lands of Asia, back- 
ward it may be said in building empires, 
these Indo-Europeans going westward and 
southward, never eastward, have hewn out 
at last a gigantic civilization of ideas and 
freedom which is fast overspreading the 
earth with its power and beneficence. It 
has been fashionable to obscure the re- 
ligious side of our Aryan ancestors, and 
to speak of those ideas as coming alto- 
gether from an alien and inferior race, the 
Semitic. Not so do we read the book of 
their history as seen in the study of lan- 
guage, in the remains of rude art and in 
the fragments of Greek, Roman, and Hin- 
doo literature, to say nothing of tradition, 
folk lore, existing laws, customs, and man- 
ners. Max Muller's translations have 
made the present generation familiar with 
the religion of the first Hindoos. It was 
not a crude pagan worship of stocks, 
stones, and reptiles, but the adoration of 
the grand powers of Nature as typifying 
the One Power ineffable in heaven far 



24 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

away. Let us never lose sight of this great 
fact. The gods of Northman and Teu- 
ton, although harsher in their vindictive 
aspect than Aditi and the seven supreme 
gods of the Vedas, were not the fierce 
spirits of darkness to propitiate whose ma- 
lign power the Shaman prays and shakes 
his rattle. No god of Kaffir or Australian 
in our advanced age rivals Balder. What 
a distance in conception of human and 
divine relations is there between the Poly- 
nesian and the most primitive Aryan ! 

We reach another stage of thought here. 
Has civilization always progressed, or has 
it sometimes receded through ages in 
certain nations and races ? This is the 
philosopher's crux. We hold, against a 
powerful school, that there has not been 
uniform, nor anything approaching uniform, 
progression, as there has certainly not been 
uniform retrogression. The world is wiser 
in the extent of its information, prouder 
in the grandeur of its aims, purer in the 
increasing beneficence of its institutions ; 
the world is richer in mental, moral, and 
material means to the ends of a just and 



THE RISE OF GOVERNMENT. 25 

ideal civilization. Progress has been grad- 
ual, steady, nearly uniform, but there have 
been great wastes where scarce an oasis 
was to be discerned by the solitary inves- 
tigator. It will not do to say that these 
were periods of real recuperation hidden 
behind the appearance of devastation and 
decay, for that is merely begging the ques- 
tion, which is one of absolute and not com- 
parative decadence. The fall of Carthage 
and the long subsequent dissolution of 
Roman dominion left all North Africa in 
a state of semi-barbarism, from which even 
the sway of the enlightened Saracen did 
not relieve it. No successor arose to this 
Saracen in his original home, and to this 
day the seats of the Arabians, the Syrians, 
the Assyrians' empire, are occupied by the 
detested and degenerate Turk. Nothing 
can be alleged of the fall of the Romans 
in their eternal city and the countries of 
its conquests, because the civilization of 
the Romans, plus the mental, moral, and 
other characteristics of the Goths, forms 
the grandest type of racial and national 
character the world has ever recognized. 



THE 

BASIS OF GOVERNMENT. 



What is government? what rational 
liberty ? 

On the answers to these questions de- 
pend the happiness and welfare of any 
people. Should we say with the learned 
and eloquent author of the " Spirit of 
Laws," that that is the best government 
which best suits the genius of a people 
and which is also the best administered ? 
Or, with more modern ideas, borrowed 
probably from some of the Greeks, must 
we hold that that government is the model 
which is most consonant with popular de- 
sires ? After all, the view of Montesquieu 
and the view of the republican are not in- 
compatible. The people, sooner or later, 
will adopt a democratic government if not 
restrained or kept in a state of gross ig- 
norance and servility. Restraints are un- 
26 • 



THE BASIS OF GOVERNMENT. 2J 

successful after a people have had a 
glimpse of liberty. Now let us not be 
hidebound. There is liberty under other 
forms of government than the republican. 
Some constitutional monarchies are mon- 
archies only in name. Some republics 
have been very despotisms for at least 
short periods. Athens was under Cleon. 
Rome, under Scylla, was a confessed tyr- 
anny. The present governments of Eng- 
land and Sweden-Norway are very liberal, 
and, if there were no friction between 
church and state, Italy would be regarded 
almost universally as a model of a state 
having free institutions. In fact, the ten- 
dency of modern thought has been steadily 
to freedom, with occasional lapses for 
short periods and notable exceptions for 
longer ones. The free Gothic spirit of old 
Spain is again breaking forth in the " Ever 
Faithful Isle," and Teutonic liberty in Fa- 
therland has not always slept since the days 
of Hermann, and is not now slumbering. 

On the setting up of our experiment, it 
was seen that ideals of statesmen and 
philosophers were possible of realization. 



28 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

Indeed, no ideal had ever been formed quite 
equal to the state of facts exhibited in the 
United States. Whether we borrowed of 
the Greek or the Italian republics, of the 
United Netherlands, of Switzerland, of the 
Hanseatic League, of Rousseau's concep- 
tion of a Social Compact, or fused all these 
with existing remains of our colonial 
dependency, — the models we took from 
Britain, — the result was something unique 
and world-pervading. This is no place in 
which to consider separate models of 
government or deal philosophically with 
government in the abstract. We certainly 
cling to no threefold division of govern- 
ments, such as those of Tacitus and Mon- 
tesquieu, usually adopted by writers. To 
us it suffices that governments seem to be 
as to their spirit free and despotic, with 
shades between. May we not be permitted 
to state compendiously that all enlightened 
government is either democratic or aristo- 
cratic, seeing that in absolute monarchies 
on the modern plan the noble class, or a 
part of it, controls the sovereign as an 
imperium in imperio ? 



THE BASIS OF GOVERNMENT. 2Q 

The great fact in government is the 
administration. As the people in liberal 
governments appreciate this fact, there will 
be improvement in their condition. All 
through history we see the law of action 
and reaction between rulers and ruled. 
At last we have reached the period of full 
representation which precludes the use of 
such words : the people rule themselves, 
— in theory, at least. 

This is a most wonderful step forward. 
The brilliant Athenian thought he had 
taken it when his Eupatrid order ceased 
to control the affairs of state. But, alas ! 
he legislated merely for the day : impatient 
to grasp everything at once, he did not lay 
very deep and secure the foundations of 
social order and popular freedom. The 
Italian republics, modelled on those of an- 
tiquity, and adapted to the purposes of 
mediaeval trade, fell far short of perfection. 
Faction became the curse of all, and on 
the ruins of democracy arose a number of 
ducal and princely houses. The law of 
liberty has been the law of progress, but, 
as in culture and civilization generally, 
3* 



30 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

there have not been wanting evidences of 
sad decline. We take heart from what we 
see and feel about us in contrast with what 
we know is behind. Whether government, 
as has been insisted by Rousseau and 
Jefferson, is based altogether in its original 
on contract or consent, or, as held by 
writers of the adverse school, on power, is 
neither worth our while to consider as a 
practical question nor to reject altogether 
as having no interest for the political stu- 
dent. What we know is that at some 
stage in human development the idea of 
consent was adopted. It is our basis now, 
possibly by slow evolution, with occasional 
set backs, from a primitive state in which 
the patriarch ruled his family, son, and 
servant, with a measure of absolute au- 
thority as the representative head. In the 
second stage we have the principle of 
representation carried further : the near- 
est kinsman rules. The third stage brings 
on the elected chieftain. Always there is 
progress from power to liberty. 

Is this view less flattering to human 
vanity or less tenable upon investigation 



THE BASIS OF GOVERNMENT. 3 1 

than that in which man now recovers what 
was his in the beginning without limitation, 
but which he through weakness yielded ? 
Is all our safety in revolution, and is there 
no security in the essential dignity of hu- 
man nature and in the flexible but un- 
erring law of progress ? 



THE 

STUDY OF POLITICS. 



In these days, when " Confound your 
politics" is a popular refrain, it is fitting 
that the study of government should be 
carried on more scientifically than at any 
previous era of the world's history. And 
yet there is great danger that what is 
gained in knowledge of details and nicety 
of methods may be lost in accuracy of 
scholarship and comprehensiveness of 
principles. As science itself becomes a 
matter of specialization very largely, so 
political science, a segment of the circle, 
is apt to become unduly specialized. It 
can afford, least of all sciences, to submit 
to this narrowing process. Taught in 
school and college, without recourse to the 
elemental principles of human nature and 
too much as a thing apart, with only 
32 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 33 

slight reference to the fundamental ordi- 
nary facts of life, and devoid frequently of 
those illustrations drawn from the parlia- 
mentary annals and the originals of his- 
tory, it is the mere husk of information, a 
showy sham and mocking pretence. As to 
those parts of comparative politics bearing 
directly on representative institutions and 
the development of republican govern- 
ment, we have plenty of learned disquisi- 
tion on the classic states, the mediaeval 
republics, and on the concrete idea of the 
state itself, — the modern state, with its 
autonomous functions and international 
obligations. But of the reason of being of 
our own particular form of government, 
as shown by the facts of its formation and 
preservation, the teaching of the day is 
absurdly meagre and strangely mislead- 
ing. The vast wealth of historical ac- 
cumulation mined within the past four or 
five decades should have made this other- 
wise. The great stores of information 
brought forth by German and English 
and American antiquarians and historians 
ought long since to have been absorbed 



34 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

into the popular manuals, and thus gone 
into general knowledge. The fact is that 
as to the fundamental features of our own 
institutions the early generations were 
better informed, except as to a very few 
things, than the later ; there has been dis- 
tinct and woful degeneracy on a matter 
of vital consequence to American citizen- 
ship. Whether, when all the passions of 
a period of feverish national unrest shall 
have subsided, the political ground lost 
shall have been recovered in time to pre- 
vent grave detriment to our society, can- 
not be predicted, but the fear of some 
wise men is that even the salvation of the 
union is not itself, great a fact as it is by 
all admitted to be, sufficient recompense 
for the retrogradation in the essential here 
described. No people ought ever to for- 
get its organic character, even for a short 
period. Perhaps no people ever do en- 
tirely. And this doubt that it does relieves 
the philosophic mind from much of the 
uncertainty on this head. 

The study of institutions is the pro- 
foundest and most engaging of all secular 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 35 

studies. It is of wider human interest 
than any other, and has most of all to do 
with human affairs, so far as they shape 
themselves with reference to merely tran- 
sitory ends. And even in the contempla- 
tion of the permanent order that exists 
for us beyond the present life, the science 
of government is of transcendent utility 
and surpassing fascination. At least, it is 
so for all broadly-based intellects. There 
is only the shadow of a truth in the pes- 
simistic remark of Thomas Paine that 
" government is a necessary evil." We 
must recognize the sharp limitations of 
human virtue, and thus see that restraint 
is a part of the economy of existence. 
Therefore government is a necessary good, 
not evil. The evil in society is the evil in 
each human being, plus the evil in hu- 
manity, minus the good in each human 
being, plus the good in humanity. The 
study of politics, therefore, is the study 
of the best good for society, and if it re- 
sult otherwise, it is because the end is per- 
verted, and not because it is not a true end. 
This leads to my formula : Politics is 



36 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

the application of the good that is possi- 
ble to the existing status. This formula 
does not exclude ideals. Ideals become 
reals when the conditions for reality ex- 
ist. The philosopher cherishes ideals, the 
statesman adapts them to circumstances. 
The ideal is Goethe's " ever-womanly," 
drawing us on to infinite heights after 
almost infinite suffering. The great 
tragedy of " Faust" is life's tragedy with 
a miracle at the beginning and at the end. 
Human government is the most com- 
plex of humanly-created things. It de- 
mands for its exercise the best powers of 
the human character. The government 
of the United States is the most complex 
of all governments in history. Its safety 
consists in its being always what it was 
intended to be by those who formed it — 
a government of the peoples of the sev- 
eral States, forming what Washington and 
Franklin, Hamilton and Madison, Jay 
and Jefferson styled in the well accepted 
phrase of their day " a confederacy." 
With the spirit of representative democ- 
racy and the form of a confederated re- 



THE STUDY OF POLITICS. 37 

public, its name describing itself better 
than any formal description could, the 
republic of the United States stands as 
the heir of Teutonic primaeval institutions 
and the free spirit of the Aryan race in 
all its branches. 



THE 
UNITY OF SOVEREIGNTY. 



Sovereignty in a state is that which is 
over all, governing all. There is no con- 
flict of opinion as to what is sovereign in 
Great Britain or Russia. The government 
in each nation is master, absolute and, ex- 
cept as to the claims of Nihilists and other 
cranks, unchallenged master. These gov- 
ernments differ, and so the sovereign is not 
the same in both. One is free, the other 
despotic. But in both instances it is the 
government, and not the people, who con- 
stitute the sovereignty. It is true that, in 
the former, a large portion of the public is 
directly interested in choosing the House 
of Commons, which is the virtual governor 
of the kingdom, but the sovereignty is 
vested, after all, in the government, and 
38 



THE UNITY OF SOVEREIGNTY. 39 

not, as with us, in the persons who elect 
the government. The difference, in brief, 
between the United States and the United 
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is 
this : — The republic has never clothed its 
agents with sovereignty, the monarchy 
has. Under the unwritten constitution of 
" Our Old Home" absolute sovereignty 
vests — no matter whether originally by 
public consent, as contended for by Free- 
man the historian, or not — in the House 
of Commons, which uses fictions implying 
sovereignty in the King or Queen. The 
Parliament has gradually acquired sover- 
eignty, and the House of Commons has 
more and more acquired single control 
over everything. The cabinet comes and 
goes as the House changes its will. The 
nominal sovereign still addresses her 
" Lords and Gentlemen," but in truth they, 
or rather the latter, are her masters. 

The people of the United States retained 
sovereignty in the beginning. They could 
not part with it without loss of autonomy. 
They cannot part with it now without such 
loss. All the writers on public law affirm 



40 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

the truth of this philosophical negative. 
It is, in fact, self-evident. 

If, as has been defined, sovereignty is 
that which is over all, which governs or 
controls all in an unqualified sense, we 
may easily see that while the King in an 
absolute monarchy, the King and legisla- 
ture in some, and the legislature with " the 
government" in other constitutional mon- 
archies is sovereign, the people only in a 
republic are sovereign. Therefore, here 
the. people of the United States possess 
the sovereignty. A fallacious idea has 
occasionally been expressed, that the Con- 
stitution of the Union is the sovereign. 
That could not be because it is the simple 
expression of the will of the true sovereigns 
on certain points. At other times the fallacy 
has even been more ludicrous, namely, that 
each individual, suffrage-endowed citizen 
is a sovereign, and that there are as many 
sovereigns in the United States as there 
are citizens entitled to vote. This refutes 
itself, because these citizens are such by the 
will of the State. Again, the exigencies of 
argument have driven many late writers 



THE UNITY OF SOVEREIGNTY. 4 1 

on public law to declare without reason, 
except the physical one of a restored 
Union after a bloody war, that the people 
of the United States are one people, — 
w r hether at the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence or the adoption of the present Con- 
stitution they do not agree. The old State 
rights school still holds to the sovereignty 
of the .States as States, and not in a con- 
federacy.* 

* " Confederacy" is the word used by Washington, 
Madison, Hamilton, and others among the founders of 
the government. 

Right here I will observe that even the wise old 
fathers did not always carry in their minds the distinc- 
tion between the sovereign State and the legislature of 
a State, — a distinction sometimes lost sight of com- 
pletely in more recent times. The sovereignty of a 
State resides only in its people. It is expressed in its 
final absolute form in the State's adoption of an organic 
law either for itself or the confederation of which it is 
a part. 

Mr. Hurd's concept of a Union-State always sover- 
eign, with power to coerce North Carolina and Rhode 
Island when they chose for a time to remain out of the 
Union of States under the new Constitution, is not his- 
torical, whatever else it is. It is not in line with the 
facts he uses so powerfully to demolish the arguments 
of the consolidation school. 



42 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

The great writers concur with Vattel,* 
who says, " every sovereignty, properly so 
called, is, in its own nature, one and indi- 
visible." Montesquieu, Locke, Puffendorf, 
Burlamaqui, Liebig, and others, all speak 
of the indivisibility of sovereignty. 

The mistake has arisen either from the 
necessity for making it or honestly from a 
confusion of ideas. It is not remembered 
that the sovereign is the possessor, and 
the powers are the things possessed. The 
old theory of our federal government was 
that it was a simple agency of the people 
of the several States. It would seem that 
few in strictness hold that theory now. 
And yet there would appear to be no 
reason for abandoning it in view of the 
history of the two constitutions the coun- 
try has lived under. If, as the Supreme 



Discussions as to the fundamental character of our 
government are always in order, and, while I make no 
apology for adhering to the State rights school, I utterly 
disclaim any purpose to unsettle anything which may 
ever have been definitively settled. 

* Book I., Sec. 65, cited by Sage, " Republic of 
Republics," p. 306, Fifth edition. 



THE UNITY OF SOVEREIGNTY. 43 

Court of the United States held in the 
slaughter-house cases, there has been no 
fundamental changes in the structure of 
our government as a result of the Civil 
War, there is nothing to induce the 
thoughtful citizen to alter or modify the 
former view of the nature of our institu- 
tions, — the view of the Federalists as well 
as of the Republicans, of Hamilton as well 
as of Madison.* After all, there is not 
much danger that the holding" of such 



* The second of the Articles of Confederation and 
Perpetual Union between the States declares that 
" each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and in- 
dependence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, 
which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated 
to the United States, in Congress assembled." Here 
is a precise delimitation, clearly showing the distinc- 
tion between sovereignty and powers. Hon. John 
Randolph Tucker, a professor of law in Washington 
and Lee University, and one of the ablest constitutional 
lawyers of this generation, tells me that he illustrates 
the matter thus : Sovereignty is the dynamo ; powers 
are its capabilities. 

Nothing that occurred in the formation, adoption, 
and ratification of the present Constitution, with its 
various amendments, has in the slightest degree inter- 
fered with the distinction drawn in the above Article II. 



44 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

opinions will break up the confederacy. 
The tendency of holding it would rather 
be to cement it. And an honest view, any 
way, one consonant with the facts, is in- 
finitely preferable to a dishonest one. 



THE 

SAYING PRINCIPLE. 



A civic virtue unspotted and unsleeping; 
a citizenhood both conserving and progres- 
sive ; a respect everywhere for private 
rights, and a sense in all breasts of the 
dignity of human nature and the reflected 
dignity of human government in a free 
land ; then, as the inevitable result of do- 
mestic integrity, a policy of justice to for- 
eign powers and of insistence upon justice 
from them, a clear adherence to the Amer- 
ican doctrine that America yields nothing 
to pressure from without and herself exerts 
no pressure to secure purposes external to 
her true and traditional policy. These are 
the moral forces of a great people separated 
by two oceans from most other powers of 
the earth and by spirit and structure of 
government from nearly every one of them. 

45 



46 A GLANCE AT GOVERNMENT. 

With a keen eye to home interests, with 
thorough education for the masses sup- 
planting half-ideas, — a foe infinitely worse, 
if permanent, than meek ignorance, — with 
a profound respect for law so long as it 
is law, and an intelligent choice of law- 
makers and administrators, the civic virtue 
above described is bound to remain forever 
as the characteristic of the highest devel- 
opment of the greatest race in the world's 
history. As it has lived in Norway and 
Switzerland and Great Britain from early 
times, soit will endure in this younger 
branch of a great family, — its saving 
principle. 



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